The demands of the current market and increasingly sophisticated consumers encourage brush manufacturers to create brushes possessing improved functionality as well as aesthetic attractiveness. In the field of oral care, e.g., this involves a variety of benefits, including not only the expected basic plaque-and-tartar removal, but also an interdental-space treatment, tongue cleaning, gum treatment, and preventive care. This, in turn, requires more complex and sophisticated brush designs, including cleaning elements, such as bristle filaments. New shapes, geometries, and material compositions of the bristle filaments are among key elements that can greatly influence the efficacy of a brush.
In a conventional brush-making process, such as, e.g., a toothbrush-making process, bristle filaments can be supplied in large, generally round, filaments bundles that include hundreds of individual filaments tightly packed together. During a brush-manufacturing process, these filaments are separated into individual pucks, mechanically or chemically treated, cut, and eventually split into individual tufts—to be implanted into a body of the brush being made. The mechanical or chemical treatment may include end-rounding, thinning, tapering, polishing, and otherwise modifying the filaments ends, as is known in the art. The filaments, e.g., may be grinded to have their ends rounded, which ends otherwise would have sharp edges after the filaments are cut. These rounded ends will become free ends of the bristles in the finished brush. In a toothbrush, the filaments' rounded ends will contact a user's teeth and gums.
In some contemporary (so-called anchorless) brush-making processes, which do not require the insertion of metal anchors to retain the bristle filaments in the brush's plastic body, tufts of filaments, after being cut, end-rounded, and/or otherwise treated, are inserted into mold plates, having patterns of holes, or channels, corresponding to the desired geometry of the filament tufts in the brush being made. The tufts of filaments are inserted in a mold bar's holes so that the filaments' treated ends will form free ends of the finished brush's bristles, while the tufts' ends opposite to the treated ends will be over-molded with a molten plastic material and thereby embedded in the plastic body of the finished brush. Examples of such and similar processes can be found in the following patent documents: EP 1 878 355, EP0472863 B1, WO 2010105745, WO 2011128020, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.
In order to create sophisticated, increasingly complex brush designs, there is a need for the brush manufacturers to be able to form, at reasonable costs, multiple tufts patterns having elaborate configuration. The present disclosure is intended to satisfy this need.